Posts in category "blogging"

I subscribe to a fair number of blogs.

Some of those bloggers use Blogger (despite my WordPress evangelism).

Some of those Blogger bloggers are technical types who would normally seize any chance to play with newly announced beta software.

Curiously, not a single one of them has experimented with the recently announced Blogger beta which includes exciting new developments like 'Labels', drag'n'drop page design, private blogs (where you can be assured no-one is reading), multiple authors, additional templates, RSS feeds and 'instant' publishing.

I lie awake at night and wonder - why ?

Judy Rose has an interesting article on the importance of writing style and Paul Stamatiou also has some excellent tips on structuring blog articles.

My writing style has many flaws. At work, I have a irritating tendency to use 'padding' words that are completely worthless, superfluous and unnecessary. For example, 'It was noted that...'.

This trait was first brought to my attention by the ruthless peer QA review process which helped to reduce my deliverable documents from 78 pages to a more reasonable 12.

In my blog, I have also noticed that I tend to overuse the word 'So'.

So, I am working hard with my English teacher to eradicate these flaws but please remember that old habits die hard.

Rugby players spend a lot of time physical training Compared to other form of sports. I have read the Rugby laws mentioned on this site. Its a gripping sport which targets the grip strength and the active mindedness of a player. American football and rugby league are also primarily collision sports, but their tackles tend to terminate much more quickly. For professional rugby, players are often chosen on the basis of their size and apparent strength and they develop the skill and power over the passage of time. In modern rugby considerable attention is given to fitness and aerobic conditioning as well as basic weight training.

There really are some sick people out there.

I heard an interesting interview on Radio 5 yesterday with UK blogger, Tom Reynolds. Tom works for the London Ambulance Service and his blog is a mixture of amusing anecdotes and real-life experiences.

I really like Tom's blog title ('Random Acts of Reality'), his tagline ('Trying to kill as few people as possible'), the dry sense of humour (summary of his recent holiday) and his general writing style.

Tom started his blog in 2003 which has just been made into a book ('Blood Sweat and Tea') which is pretty remarkable.

Most definitely, one for the blogroll.

The first blog I ever saw was this one (this entry to be precise) and to be honest, I just couldnt see the point whatsoever.

Then I stumbled across Tom Kyte's blog which was relevant, interesting and sparked my interest in reading other technical (Oracle related) blogs.

Just over a year ago, I started a blog (on blogger.com). Little did I know it but WordPress.com was launched the day before.

The creation of the blog was simply a quick experiment to play around with the blogging software. Secondly I was interested to see how long it would take to get a comment on the blog from a standing start. Then I fully expected to lose interest completely.

The first comment 'Great blog!' from a German reader duly arrived after 6 weeks. Looking back, this was probably comment spam so I was lucky enough to count this as one of the first proper comments.

Initially, I thought I would produce more technical content but, to be honest, the blog is done for fun in my spare time and I think there are a wealth of more interesting, amusing subjects to write about than Oracle and Siebel. In any case, a lot of very intelligent, articulate people are already producing a raft of excellent technical blogs.

So, a year on, and much to my surprise, the blog is still going strong. I discovered that I actually enjoy writing. Maybe this is because I have to produce fairly dry technical reports as part of my job.

Over the year, there were bursts of activity (11 consecutive days in January) mainly from lonely European hotel rooms while on another occasion, inspiration dried up and my finger was poised over 'Delete this blog'.

I have made some new contacts and met up with some old friends which was also quite unexpected and welcome. Anyway, one thing's for sure; if there was no-one out there reading and occasionally commenting, I would lose all interest in blogging in isolation so thanks for reading.

And finally, please forgive my self indulgence for a moment, but here is a list of my favourite Top 10 posts from the last year:

1. A narrow escape.

Yes. That's it. After one year, the only memorable post is one written years before I even started this blog. I simply must try harder this year.

No-one ever asks me: Hey Norman, why don't you have a blogroll with 457 interesting, thought provoking sites for me to look at ?.

Firstly, while I find the reading lists of others interesting and a useful means of discovering new sources, I don't particularly want an lengthy blogroll adding yet more clutter to my (sort of) minimalist blog.

Secondly, my RSS reading lists are stored on a Netvibes server. I have separate tabs for 'Oracle', 'WordPress', 'Sport', 'News', 'Blogs', 'Tech', 'Software' and a small one called 'UK'. I would love to be able to publish these tabs and share the contents with everyone.

Ideally, I would like to publish all my Netvibes tabs somewhere which would always reflect my subscriptions. This would ensure that the lists are always up to date and reflect my current reading list so transient blogs (like World Cup 2006) and dead blogs would be removed.

Netvibes has a ecosystem for sharing resources but I am not quite sure whether this does precisely what I want. If I wasn't so lazy, I might investigate further.

One thing I like about Bloglines is the tight and seamless integration of the 'My Feeds' reading list with the Bloglines blog. The blogroll on the Bloglines blog is always synchronised with the Bloglines reading list. Automatically. No need to think about it. No need to export your OPML and upload it (again). Bloglines manages this for you. OK - it was the only thing I liked about my Bloglines blog but still.

This is exactly how it should be and what Share Your OPML is sadly lacking. Share Your OPML has some promising features for popular and common feeds, feed discovery, recommendations and match making. However, while I can share my feeds on Share Your OPML, this is merely a static, outdated list.

The onus is on me to remember to do something i.e. export my reading list from my current RSS reader and upload a modified OPML file at recurring, regular intervals.

This is a lot of tedious work for me to do. Computers are much better at this sort of stuff than humans. We are in 2006 and using Web 2.0 after all. Finally, please remember that I am very, very lazy.

So, that's why I don't have a blogroll.

A trawl across the blogosphere revealed that hardly anyone, with any sense, hosts a blog at Yahoo 360 or Bloglines which is very surprising indeed.

Or maybe not.

The Metro is a free, lightweight, disposable newspaper, aimed at commuters, which is solely funded by advertising revenues. So lightweight, you can finish it by the time you reach Waterloo but at least it saves you the embarrassment of staring at your neighbour for 27 minutes.

Last month, The Metro reported the exciting news that a quarter of all UK internet users maintain a blog. Hurrah !

However, the veracity of this claim is immediately subverted by the statement that '59% of bloggers choose to make it public.' So, this implies that 41% of UK bloggers are blogging in private, by invitation only, to friends and family or in complete isolation. I know the British are reserved but that is simply ridiculous.

The article then goes on to claim 'growing numbers of writers see [blogs] ... as a way to get their voice heard.' A little difficult to get your voice heard if your blog is not even published on the internet.

I don't think this superb journalism coupled with the deep, considered incisive analysis is going to challenge Dave Sifry's ' State of the Blogosphere'.

PS. Memo to self: Idea for Dragon's Den - a decent portal for UK bloggers.

It really is in a right old state. I have a Netvibes tab called UK. It has a solitary, uninspiring, dry news feed from the BBC.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy a lot of blogs from UK authors. Some are (Scottish) technical types in the Oracle blogging community with a sense of humour while others are Brits who have moved to foreign shores or very talented and dedicated WordPress techies.

Clearly, this is highly unsatisfactory and slightly underwhelming. I am certain there must be a wealth of witty, interesting, fascinating blogs out there written by British people but I just can't find them.

So - come on - where are you all hiding ?

Norman Brightside, a little known UK blogger from the London (near England), was reeling yesterday from a cataclysmic, violent (yet unwanted) backlash of media inspired attention from Web 2.0 types in response to the impromptu and inadvertent release of 1367 GB of search data (including IP addresses, referrer data, explicit search terms and agent identifiers) from the Web server farm that hosts his incredibly popular blog.

Brightside is an IT genius who had developed his Web server tracking technology using advanced AI techniques to include the screen name of the AOL user, the room they were actually surfing from, what they were actually thinking, the strength of each individual key press together with the facial expression used when typing in search terms.

Data Mining analysts have been busily crunching the data continuously for 37 hours using Oracle Mega-Grid technology and a bank of powerful Cray Supercomputers. Details have been forwarded to Interpol and, in a curious twist, Blackburn Football Club, who are now being linked with Ashley Cole.

Norman's mum, Norma Jean was distraught:

'Oh I can't believe our stupid son, Norman, has brought shame, embarrassment and pestilence upon the Brightside family name. I knew he had a blog but how could he have been so stupid ?'

Although the data was de-personalised, analysts predicted that simple business intelligence and sophisticated cryptography techniques (1='A', 2='B' etc) would quickly reveal the end user issuing each individual search query, who could then be subject to prosecution, hanging and the immediate loss of his Telewest subscription.

Norman Brightside has gone into hiding and withdrawn the data sets from all public Web sites. He issued the following short press release from The Priory Clinic, London.

'I'm really, really sorry. I don't know what came over me. I simply didn't think my blog had that much traffic. I think there must be a problem with the WordPress statistics which seem to be under-reporting. My only defence is that my error might have been caused by the excessive heat in my hotel room. I have carefully backed up and deleted all the data now.'

However, high bandwidth mirror sites, located all around the world, are thought to still contain multiple copies of the full, unadulterated search data.

And finally, if you don't want to risk imprisonment, death or a call from the NSA, here is that earth shattering search data published in full.

65.214.44.29 - - [07/Aug/2006:01:20:17 +0100] "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.1" 304 106 "Why didn't United buy Own Hargreaves" "Mozilla/5.0" 72.30.98.202 - - [07/Aug/2006:01:21:57 +0100] "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.1" 304 106 "Who is Norman Brightside" "Opera 9.0 Beta 2"